again. One by one the rainwater pools dry
out. Soon the grazing multitudes of the pan
edge savanna find themselves joined at the
springs by swelling crowds of mixed feeders
like springbok and browsers like kudus from
neighboring thorn-scrub and mopani wood
land habitats. These in turn attract an in
creasing force of predators-as well as
50,000 tourists a year.
AT THE TIME of my stay the reserve
was being squeezed by a drought cy
cle, and some artesian springs had
shrunk to trickles. But once or twice in a dec
ade prolonged hard rains send rivers to the
north and east coursing along their channels
and into Etosha. Then the sun-cracked pan
partly fills with water and becomes, howev
er shallow and alkaline, however briefly, a
lake again-the grandest water hole of all.
This happened in 1971. As Hu Berry re
corded each stage of the lake's resurrection,
more than a million flamingos turned acres
of its waters pure breeding-plumage pink.
Where they came from, no one knows for
sure; the flocks seem to belong to Africa as
a whole. Here they paused to join hosts of
water birds from plovers to pelicans, taking
advantage of an exploding food web of
plankton, insects, barbel fish, and frogs.
As we drove over the plains one afternoon,
Hu recalled that teeming season of'71. "The
greater flamingos [which live on zooplank
ton-microscopic animals] scooped togeth
er mud platforms and successfully reared
young on the flooded pan from February
through May. Next the lesser flamingos
[which eat phytoplankton-algae and dia
toms] had their turn. But by August the
lessers were in trouble." Water was evapor
ating fast, the lake edge drawing away from
the breeding colonies. With it went the
birds' food supply. Soon, four-footed preda
tors would be prowling the mud.
Hu prepared for what he dubbed Opera
tion Flamingo-a repeat of a park project
two years earlier, when thousands of strand
ed chicks had been rounded up and trucked
to water.
"In my plane surveys this time, though,"
Hu said, "I noticed that large groups of par
ents and pulli [young] had left the nesting
sites and were walking-trekking day after
day-across the pan."
About 30,000 chicks began this odyssey.
A month later 25,000 reassembled at water
lingering near the Ekuma Delta 50 miles dis
tant. In their own version of Operation Fla
mingo, the young birds-except for a yard
full of stragglers hand-raised by Hu and his
wife, Conny-had marched every step of
the way.
The earliest written account of the pan
came from a Swede, Karl Andersson, who
ventured through the region in 1851
accompanied by the English scientist Fran
cis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin. As late
as 1876 the American Gerald McKiernan
could still count himself among the few
white men ever to have glimpsed Etosha.
He described it with an American's enthu
siasm as a sight "all the menageries in the
world turned loose would not compare to."
McKiernan was a trader, though, and the
trader is a harbinger of change. Before the
century turned, Boers, Germans, and other
whites had begun to settle around the area,
introducing high-powered rifles and ex
panding numbers of domestic livestock.
Among the first to feel the impacts of Eu
ropean colonization were Etosha's only in
digenous human inhabitants, Stone Age
hunter-gatherers of a Bushman race called
the Heikum. They were never very popu
lous, and some succumbed to diseases that
the white men brought. Others were ab
sorbed by neighboring Ovambo, Herero,
and Damara tribes, all semi-nomadic cattle
herders and themselves shifting to accom
modate Europeans.
The last Heikums were to become em
ployees of the Etosha reserve. They worked
there as trackers and laborers, and a few of
their descendants still do, though intermar
riage has essentially erased the bloodline.
7IUTILDLIFE populations too were
dwindling when in 1907 the Ger
man government of South-West Af
rica, as Namibia was known until recently,
proclaimed three vast game reserves. The
largest was Game Reserve No. 2, Etosha. At
36,300 square miles, about twice the size of
Switzerland, it was far and away the most
enormous on the globe. From east of the pan
it extended westward through the desert
colored mountains of Kaokoland to the At
lantic Ocean.
NationalGeographic, March 1983
356